Staying Offline

While I was in India, it was completely different way of spending time at home. In absence of a ‘24 hr
connectivity’ which I am used to, I had to find other ways to spend time when I am not out of house for some work.

Sudoku: I ended up improving my skills in solving Sudoku. I would pick up daily newspaper and try to solve. I definitely got around to solving hardest levels of Sudoku called ‘Evil Sudoku’ with some practice. It would take me 30 minutes or so to solve it. Sometimes I had to give up but this was an interesting activity.

Watching TV: I don’t watch as much TV but ended up watching good amount of TV with a variety of channels available there. A little of movies and a little of talent shows is what interested me. Talent shows come in a variety with different age groups, different talents. But singing is one that makes it interesting to watch.

Reading newspaper?: I certainly lost habit of reading one with more of my time spent on online versions. I would quickly browse through key items.

I always managed to get at least one hour internet time but this time I had to focus on important things I wanted to get done than browsing like the way I do when I am always connected.

Interestingly I learned that I can spend time without being online and now I am getting back to older habits like reading books (not online)

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Connected All Day

Education with Dignity

I spent less than 36 hours in Rajahmundry during my visit, but I managed to devote approximately 3 hours to meet and check on the non-profit work that we have done and plan for future work.

For past few years, we have been able to support improving infrastructure for some of the public schools in
Rajahmundry. It has not been a lot of but slowly and steadly, we could make a difference. Providing benches
to sit on, providing decent toilets, repairing the classrooms are variety of things we coulod support. Local
Rotary Club members have been very supportive in carrying out the projects.

This time, I managed to visit one school that is more than 100 years old in existence. This particular
school has more than 800 students but has no toilet facility. Also, as I toured the school, I cannot
describe how felt. Some of the classrooms have no benches. It is also easy to understand that drop out rate
is higher among girl students due to lack of amenities. I would like to term this as an effort to provide
‘Education with Dignity’.

By providing financial support to these schools, I hope we will succeed in restoring some dignity and make
education/coming to school is something that motivates the children to succeed.

I am attaching couple of photos that show state of the school.

Click here to visit list of schools we managed to support over the years

Class Rooms

Performance Criteria Explained

Performance Management is a tough task to manage. Providing right feedback so that individuals understand in a proper context is hardest thing to do. Individuals will be emotional about their performance. When everyone does their best, an attempt to rate them always looks unfair.

In recent times, my thoughts were focused on how can we make it easy for someone to understand their own pperformance.

I have come up with a metaphor to make it easy for individuals to evaluate their pperformance.

Imagine tasks individuals need to performance on job as pebbles, bricks and rocks.

Pebbles: These are routine and small tasks. Every job has a bunch of them. You need to do them regularly.

Bricks: These are projects that you are responsible for.

Rocks: These are tasks, projects that involve significant effort. You cannot tackles them in one shot. You need persistence, effort to tackle them.

Now to benchmark and measure performance of an individual, ask the individual to identify as one of the following

Kid: A new employee in the organization
Normal Adult: An employee with good amount of experience.
Well Built Adult: Very experienced employee
Body Builder: Highly experienced employee

If you leave any of the above individual for an hour and instruct them to move as many Pebbles, Bricks or Rocks they can move, it is common sense to understand how they performed.

There are a variety of outcomes that can happen in one hour. Following are a few examples and how you can interpret the performance

Kid:
- Moves lot of pebbles: Normal erformance
- Moves a few pebbles, one or two bricks: Good Performance
- Moves no pebbles, attempts to move bricks: Below Normal Performance as failed to perform routine tasks.
- Moves no pebbles, no bricks and is trying to push the rock: Below Normal Performance as he seems to be focused on wrong things.
- Nothing Moves: Does not know what to do (wrong person, wrong job)

In a similar way, you can extend this common sense approach to understand an individual’s performance and let individuals identify what pebbles, bricks and rocks they moved.

If you are an employee, will the above approach make it easy to understand performance criteria?

If you are a manager, will the above appraoch make it easy for you to put employee performance in a proper perspective?

Share your thoughts.

Temple Visits

Visiting temples was one of the main activity during visit to India. Following are various temples we visited.

- Sanghi Temple: This is a temple on outskirts of Hyderabad with Lord Venkateswara as main deity. This was also a spot of many telugu film scenes. We went there on a day when it rained. The temple is located on a hill is far from noise of the city.
Link to more information about Sanghi temple

- Chilkur Balaji Temple: Also known as Visa Venkateswara Swami, this temple is unique in many ways. This is a very small temple but gets crowded a lot as devotee make perambulations to get their wishes fulfilled. There is no hundi for collecting money in this temple. This temple is also located around 20 kms from city. On visiting this temple, we realized this also was part of telugu movie Anand.

More about Chilkur Temple
- Simhachalam: Visiting this temple was not in our plan. But divine intervention seems to have influenced
mind of my friend to take us to this temple. It was not first time for me, but for my family members it was
first time. Temple was not crowded and we had a nice darshan, performed archana.  I am glad that we could make it despite our very short visit to Visakhapatnam.

More about Simhachalam
- Basara: Temple of Goddess Saraswati located around 200 Kms from Hyderabad. This place is on banks of river Godavari. Visiting this temple is a whole day despite starting early in the day.  This is famous for taking children to initiate them into education.

More about Basara
- Ainavilli: Temple of Lord Ganesha is located around 65 kms from Rajahmundry. Because of narrow roads, it takes couple of hours to reach there by road. You will cross quite a few villages on the way.

More about Ainavilli
- Padmanabha Swamy Temple: I visited this temple in November 2007 and my experience was etched in memory as I spent some time in the temple listening to chanting of Vishnu Sahasranamam that was reverberating in temple complex. I was not sure whether I will go this time but again Lord has his plans. My friend visiting me from Chennai had plans in mind and we made a trip to temple together. This temple gets quite crowded when it is time to look at the Lord. I am glad that I could make another trip this time also.
More about Padmanabha Swamy Temple

- Sai baba temple, Dislsukhanagar: This temple is located on mainroad in Hyderabad and is quite well maintained.  We gained solace by visiting this as we could not visit Shirdi on this trip.

- Vivekanda Rock Memorial: Kanyakumari: I visited this after almost 20 years. I remember visiting when I came on south india tour organized by our school. Having gained a better knowledge of Swami Vivekananda, visiting this now has a different significance. We reached in time to catch last ferry to the rock at 4 PM. This memorial has a meditation hall. Since this rock is not quite far from mainland, I felt it may be worth considering a walkway bridge in addition to ferry service.

Rock Memorial Website